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May-lee Chai presents TOMORROW IN SHANGHAI, with Nina de Gramont at Flyleaf Books
October 19, 2022 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai’s latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality—always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power.
These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai’s stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.
May-lee Chai is the award-winning author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories (Blair, 2022). Her prior story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, won the 2019 American Book Award. She previously taught in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and is now chair of the creative writing department at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and recipient of an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards. Her short prose has appeared widely, including in Seventeen, New England Review, Longreads, Paris Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Los Angeles Times, Best Small Fictions anthology, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and cited as Notable in two editions of the Best American Essays anthology. She is a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Nina de Gramont is the author of nine books, including the New York Times bestseller, THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR, which was the Reese’s Book Club pick for February, 2022. She has also written several books for young adults. Nina teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
